


Interdimensional Quasihistorical Smut Heirloom

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-07
Updated: 2014-01-07
Packaged: 2018-01-07 19:42:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1123654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the 1990s, covert resistance leader and acclaimed fantasy author Rose Lalonde gets to know failed inventor and hunted recluse Jade English.  An indeterminate length of time later, Roxy Lalonde and Jade Harley hit it off.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Interdimensional Quasihistorical Smut Heirloom

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Khemi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Khemi/gifts).



“The information you’ve provided for us is of limited use, unfortunately.”  Rose’s eye is drawn to the way that English stirs her coffee, holding it by its business end and swirling its handle in a steadily tightening spiral.  “Not that it isn’t absolutely fascinating, of course, or that we doubt its veracity,” she adds.  “It is merely that we have no practical means of applying it at present.”

“Because between your group and her, there are front companies and proxy villains, and because she probably already controls half of the government.”  Continuing to stir her coffee, English looks at Rose with a level of intensity that Rose finds unnerving.  If her story is true -- and Rose feels, instinctively, that it is -- then Jade English has been alive for a very long time, but her eyes are clear and steady, and fixated on Rose in a way that makes her feel exposed.  This is not a feeling that Rose is used to.

In the eighties, when Rose was still in high school, she did volunteer work for a few months at a nursing home for the elderly, several blocks away from where she and her mother had lived at the time.  It had provided inspiration and perspective; in a time when she had sorely needed both; there was something about being in contact with people who were very close to death that made the right things click in her brain, at least until the place started to scare the hell out of her.  As short as her time there had been, she had known a great many people around English’s age, enough that Rose had expected a very different sort of woman when English had originally contacted her.  Jade English looks closer to fifty than to eighty, and she speaks and moves like someone less than half her age.  

“We can only probe so far without marking ourselves as a target, but yes,” Rose says.  “And while we aren’t sure how much power she has on that kind of scale, on a smaller scale, we know that she has had quite a few people murdered before.” 

“Mm,” English agrees, still stirring her coffee.  “She would be more likely to torture you first, bend you to her will.”

The idea is so cartoonishly villainous that Rose wonders, not for the first time, how the world has managed to change so much in so little time.  Of course, given the information English has brought her and her associates, she needs to amend her thinking; the world has been changing for a very long time, nearly a century, and so the change is really only speeding up.  “I see.” 

“You don’t,” English says, “not yet.”  There is something in her voice that Rose doesn’t like, a mixture of pity and bitterness.  “You’ll only see when she comes out into the open.”  She drinks her tea, leaving the obvious unsaid:   _If you live that long_. 

\--

Roxy Lalonde remembers handling her mother’s journal with as much reverence as her soused younger self had been able to manage.  Now, sober, she has torn the thing apart, assembled its pages in a neat pile, and begun the process of scanning it piece by piece with Jade Harley’s help.  

Like everything else her mother left her, the journal was well preserved.  When Roxy first found the journal, she had half expected its pages to dissolve to ash like a hoard of ancient scrolls after a plucky, well-intentioned adventurer opened the crypt they were hidden in and exposed them to the air for the first time in hundreds of years.  Roxy half expected this because Jake English was kind of an idiot.  

Whether that expectation had held merit or not, it had lent the moment of first opening the journal a mystical quality that was gone now; she had read it cover to cover dozens of times.  It’s strange, then, to see someone else reading her mother’s words for the first time, even if she’s doing it on a computer screen.

“Whoa,” Jade says, a laugh briefly overtaking the sound of the scanner at work on the latest page.  “Are alpha-me and your mom going to make out?”  

Roxy scowls.  “Are you reading ahead?”

“Oh geez, that’s totally a yes, isn’t it?”  Jade pushes back from her work desk and sets her chair to spinning with a gentle kick at the floor.  “I’m not sure what she saw in me.  I kind of come across as a paranoid jerk in this!”  

“Be fair; everyone was paranoid because the batterwitch was on the rise.  They had to be.  Besides, if you wouldn’t skip, you’d know that Mom later says that you were _dashing and adventurous_.”  Standing up, Roxy grabs Jade’s chair by its back and pushes it until it hits the edge of her desk, making the monitor tremble. 

Looking up at Roxy, Jade lifts her legs, tucks her feet in front of her thighs and smiles.  “Do you think I’m dashing and adventurous?”  

Spinning the chair to face the desk again before Jade can see her blush, Roxy pulls the finished page from the scanner and sets the next one in place.  “I think you’re flirting instead of working.”

“Well, alpha-me was a hard worker and still found the time to ‘ _skate her lips up the curve of my neck_ \--’”  Jade bursts into giggles as Roxy shakes her lightly by the shoulder.  “What, it’s true!  ‘ _Drawing a breathy gasp from me as she smiled against my throat_ \--’”

“I’ll show that to Rose if you don’t stop skipping, I’m totes serious.”

“Half of your mom’s journal is serious stuff about alien takeovers and the other half is smut, oh my gosh.”

“You’ve only read four or five pages out of almost two hundred, Jadey!”  Roxy fights to keep her face straight.  “It’s really more like a quarter.”

“Oh my gosh,” Jade repeats, and then they’re both laughing, Roxy perhaps a bit harder than Jade, and it’s nice.  Nicer than reading her mother’s journals alone, by a pretty wide margin.  

 


End file.
